iOS Today 817 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on iOS Today, it's time, yes, once again, to start thinking about heading back to school. So that's what Rosemary Orchard and I, Micah Sargent, do. Podcasts you love.

Rosemary Orchard [00:00:15]:
From people you trust.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:17]:
This is TWiT. This is iOS Today, episode 817, with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent, recorded Tuesday, August 18th, 2026 for Thursday, August 27th, 2026. Digital Backpacks, Best Apps for Back to School — Hello and welcome to iOS Today, the show where we talk all things iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, HomePodOS, and more. I am one of your hosts. My name is Micah Sargent.

Rosemary Orchard [00:00:46]:
And my name is Rosemary Ratched, and we are here to hopefully teach you a lesson, but in a fun way, folks.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:54]:
Indeed, indeed. Yes. So this is about the time, at least in the US, where students are preparing, well, probably more hoping not to go back to school, but their parents certainly, parents or guardians certainly are preparing for them to go back to school. And so we thought it was a good time to refresh you on some of the apps and services out there that you or your children can make use of when it comes to studying. This, of course, doesn't just apply to elementary, middle school, and high schoolers. It can also apply to those of us and college and those of us who are, you know, studying other things in school. So without further ado, let's kind of get into it. I wanted to mention at the top of it, because I was trying to think of it in sort of a going throughout the day kind of situation, right? From the beginning of the day to the end of the day.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:56]:
And so I thought I'd start with the— a cool app called Structured. This is an app that's available to download for free. It does have a pro plan that starts at $6.99 a month. It's available for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. And its purpose is kind of, kind of twofold. So typically it's been my experience that I don't know if they still do this. They may not anymore because now everything's on computers. But when I went to school, we would get a printed out sort of calendar that was like in a little, a little agenda book.

Mikah Sargent [00:02:33]:
And then when I was in college, you could buy them. And so you had your sort of planner, but then a lot of people like to use things like a Pomodoro timer. And what Structured does is it serves as the structure of your day. So it combines both a school planner and a focus timer and then has this sort of visual timeline so that you can kind of see what you need to do. throughout the day. What's great about it too is that it does have the ability to add classes so you can kind of see those repeats going on. And then if you are in— I remember in high school being in an intensive writing class, being able to sort of set timelines and deadlines and reminders for working on your next essay is really nice. And it has very— it's very easy to sort of drag and drop things around to give you the, you know, necessary tools to make adjustments on the fly.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:40]:
And that's always happening whenever you're in school. I also wanna give it a shout out because as I was going through it, it has very good voiceover options, very good voice control integrations, and also includes dyslexia-friendly fonts as well. So that is always an important aspect for me that, that accessibility and neurodiversity are kept in mind there as well. Very good ratings. It's an Apple Editor's Choice and maintains a 4.8 score. And also it has been featured in the past in Apple's kind of stories where the editorial team will pick out different pieces. So I, I think it's well worth a look. That is Structured, the daily planner Planner and Timer in the App Store.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:38]:
Rosemary, what's next?

Rosemary Orchard [00:04:41]:
All right, well, I am just gonna start at the top of my list here because there's a bunch of good reasons to talk about so many apps. And I would like to say there are a lot of apps that we can include because we have a limit on our showtime, folks. Uh, so I'm not going to be able to talk about every single app out there, but I do want to give a shout out to GoodNotes. It was a toss-up between GoodNotes and Notability. I normally lean towards Notability, so decided to give GoodNotes its fair share of the time this year. But essentially, it's a digital note-taking app. But of course, the big advantage being if you want to use it on your iPad, you've got your Apple Pencil, you can scribble, you've got your camera built into the iPad or iPhone, you can take pictures and drop those in. You can, you can go crazy with this.

Rosemary Orchard [00:05:29]:
Naturally, like everything else, it has its own AI features. It's got fully searchable handwriting. You can record audio which is synced to your note-taking. So as you've written the word banana, you can go back and tap on it in the audio and listen to what was being talked about when you wrote that. My personal tip is whenever I'm taking notes and I've got an audio recording going and I'm just lost, I just draw a massive question mark and circle it until I get to a point where I can start taking notes again. And then I go again because that way, you know, I've got a really good obvious marker to go back to. Something else that you can do with this, which I highly recommend, is if you are taking any kind of class or anything and slides or a PDF of some kind is made available to you, sticking that into GoodNotes or Notability, both of them work really well for this, and annotating it as you go is definitely one of my preferred ways to consolidate and make sure that I actually learn things. Uh, because I don't want to have to learn it all again at home before I take an exam.

Rosemary Orchard [00:06:36]:
So yeah, uh, GoodNotes, uh, it's, yeah, free to download and give it a bit of a try, um, or $9.99 a year or $28.99 one-time in-app purchase, uh, according to the information I could find. There's a couple of different prices available in the App Store, so you may find that there are different options available to you.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:53]:
I wanted to also highlight GoodNotes as the next step in this process. So you've got your, your school schedule planned out, you know which classes you need to go to, you've got that place to store your assignment reminders. GoodNotes comes in. I think it's one of those— it's arguably one of the apps that can sell an iPad to a parent who's sending their kid off to college, or that can sell an iPad to a person who can afford their own. You know, it keeps your syllabus, it keeps your handwritten notes, those PDF annotations. If you've got the synchronized audio going on and that study material, it's all built in all right there. And I think that it's really a very powerful app for being able to kind of keep your notebooks all in one place. Sort of adding on top of GoodNotes, if you've got your, you know, you've got your schedule planned out, you've got your timers, you've got the notes, what about when it comes time to review for class? Well, that's where an app like Quizlet can come in because it can make use of the notes that you write in GoodNotes to help you generate the, the studies that you need to do.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:17]:
It's, it's a retrieval. It can turn these notes, these recordings into a study guide. It can make flashcards. And then you use that learn mode or you can create a practice test and then test yourself right then. It does have AI built in, and it is something that then of course needs to be checked to make sure it's accurate. So I, you know, that's, that's something that you will want to bear in mind. But you can create your own Quizlet flashcards, your own Quizlet tests, and I frankly recommend that as a means of doing so. Um, it is also ranked very well.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:58]:
4.8 is its rating, and that's like 1.1 million different people who have rated that, that's, that's doing quite well. Also, the fact that Quizlet is an app that gets recommended by a lot of different schools and universities as a means of study, I think also sets it apart from the competition.

Rosemary Orchard [00:09:23]:
I agree. Quizlet is a great choice. It definitely replaces the ancient and no longer existing app that I used to use that could import things from Google Sheets, uh, which was always a fun experiment to try and create those, uh, flashcards myself. The next one I'm going to recommend is, in my personal opinion, great for doing group projects where you're gonna sit and you're gonna have a chat about how a group project is going to get done. Uh, you figure out who's the person who is just there for the free ride, who is the person who is actually probably going to do all of the work, and who are the other 2 who will turn up and do enough to earn their names being on the COVID of whatever it is that's being delivered? Not that I have experience with group projects, folks. Spoiler, I'm, I'm always the one that does all of the work. That's just me. But one of the ways that you can make sure that everybody agrees on what was actually said is by recording those meeting sessions.

Rosemary Orchard [00:10:18]:
So if you do it online, this is obviously a lot easier, but if you do it in person, you can also use the app, which is Otter. So otters are utterly adorable, obviously, but Otter is also a transcription service. And the thing that I really love about this is it has speaker tagging. So it can figure out, for example, if I just threw a recording of this podcast into your standard transcription machine, then it would just come out with one long piece of text and it wouldn't necessarily differentiate between Micah and myself. However, Otter can differentiate between voices, text speakers, it can do it in real time. And it can also generate summaries of things as well. So the one thing I'll say is if you are planning on using this in lectures, then you probably want to get the permission of whoever is teaching your class to record it. Because, you know, obviously, it's, it's up to them whether or not they allow that.

Rosemary Orchard [00:11:14]:
That said, students have been recording lectures since digital— well, actually not even digital— analog recording devices were created in a portable enough format. You know, the good old dictaphone. I remember wanting one of those and ending up using my iPad towards the end of my first university degree to just record some classes so I could go back and listen to them again and again to make sure I was ready for the exam. But yeah, Otter is a great way to help you handle some of the more interesting sides Mm-hmm. Of academia, or quite frankly, just to settle that argument in your family over who actually agreed that they were cooking Thanksgiving dinner when you have that discussion over the next coming weeks.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:58]:
Mm-hmm. Very well put. If we're continuing on with our kind of trip through the day, you may get an assignment, again, an essay, and need to complete that essay. And that is where an app like Essayist can come into play. It is this sort of specialized word processor. It's a specialized word processor that also includes a reference manager if you're doing academic work. I remember back in the day, Rosemary, when we had to make our bibliographies by hand, and it was part of the grading process to get the bibliography exactly right. And these days—

Rosemary Orchard [00:12:40]:
Oh yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:41]:
It all just handles itself, it seems. You get these wonderful in-text citations It'll update the bibliography. You can change your style. So if you've got one teacher who says 14-point Times New Roman double-spaced and another teacher who says 10-point Arial single-spaced, you can do that and then export the, you know, the stuff that you want exactly how you want. It is a really nice thing as well for all of the different formatting that you might need to do because of course it depends on what tools or rather what specific style that you're doing. But being able to create the paper with APA, MLA, Chicago style and being able to add in those citations and export to Word or PDF make it very, very good. It is a— it looks a little expensive at first blush, but I think when you get an idea of what is possible with the app, it does change things like it is. It'll save you a lot of time, I guess, is my point.

Mikah Sargent [00:13:51]:
And I think that that alone is worth checking out for sure. Yes.

Rosemary Orchard [00:13:59]:
Speaking of having to solve academic problems, sometimes you kind of need a little bit more of an explanation. And there is an app, Mike, you're going to have to remind me of the name of it. I think it starts with math or something for helping you figure out maths equations. Is it Math Notes? Math Notes, that's the one. Because you do frequently recommend that. But Socratic, which is by Google, is a little different. And you can point your camera at any question and it'll give you a step-by-step explanation. And it has video lessons for all of the supported subjects built in there.

Rosemary Orchard [00:14:35]:
So the— unfortunately, I was trying to download this earlier and it didn't seem to be available here in the UK, which was very unfortunate. Oh, that's unfortunate. not working for me at the moment. But yeah, Socratic by Google. Very, very useful if you can get your hands on it.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:53]:
That is cool. That is honestly, once you have, you, you know, sort of, again, you've got your scheduler, you've got your note taker, you've got the way to study at home, and you've got a way to write essays, you're well on your way. to doing what you need to do. Of course, as Rosemary points out, it is nice to have an app for being able to work on your math homework. And I guess the one thing that I would leave, or, you know, would want added to the list would be, what if I'm taking a French class or a Spanish class or something like that? Any apps that are available to kind of focus on, or rather study? Uh, those, those subjects?

Rosemary Orchard [00:15:44]:
Well, how do you feel about learning Klingon, Micah? Because that is yet another option available to us with Duolingo. Uh, there is a lot to be said, positive and negative, about Duolingo, but overall I found it is a fun experience, especially if you have classes, uh, that are teaching you in person. Uh, then this can be a really great companion to help you continue, uh, those— that education outside the classroom, because it's You know, what you do outside the classroom, folks, it counts just as much as what you do inside the classroom. You gotta do that, put that work in. Uh, so Duolingo is gamified learning for 14 languages. The bird does get angry if you skip your daily lesson. Uh, so that's just a warning to you. It will get angry, and then it will get sad, and then it will get angry again.

Rosemary Orchard [00:16:29]:
It goes through multiple cycles of grief. Um, but that said, it's still a bird. trying to help you learn a language. And they have been— they went through a phase of using a lot of AI for everything, and then they backed off of that a bit because they realised that maybe AI is not perfect at foreign languages because most LLMs were trained on English data. And English is complicated enough, being multiple languages in a trench coat, that throwing French at it, for example, might be a bit of a problem. So they have brought back a good number of staff, as far as I'm aware. to help with their language lessons. But yeah, it adapts to your pace.

Rosemary Orchard [00:17:12]:
So if you're struggling with things, then it will add more lessons around the things that you're struggling on and so on and so forth, which is fun. And I've used this myself to accompany my language learning. And as a person with a degree in modern foreign languages who studied 7 languages at the same time at one point, it was very useful and I highly recommend it. At least I did. I love using it back in the day. I've been using it more recently just to pick up some phrases for some of my new colleagues at work.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:40]:
Oh, nice.

Rosemary Orchard [00:17:41]:
It's fun, you know, learning a little bit of Romanian is always an interesting challenge, you know, to add to your morning right before your morning meeting with everybody.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:53]:
Yeah, sounds like it. Folks, there are once again, there are loads of back-to-school apps, and I think that the important thing here is that you are given like the tools that you need and nothing more. It can be difficult bouncing between apps and trying to figure out what works with what and what doesn't. And of course, you'll also have schools that have special apps that they want you to use, that your students want you to use, or that they want your students to use. It all depends. But these are some great kind of jumping-off points to get you there. And if you hear, you know, your student saying, oh, I've got write an essay and I don't know how to do this, then you could point them to Essayist, for example. If you, you know, seem— if it seems like they are struggling to stay organized, then something like Structured might be helpful.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:52]:
And a good note-taking app is so important. If there's one thing that I would encourage you to encourage your students to do, it would be taking notes and, and sort of championing and celebrating a student who takes notes, because that is a skill that requires practice and it is a skill that will become incredibly important later on. And—

Rosemary Orchard [00:19:25]:
Yes.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:25]:
It is a skill that I pretty much had to wait to develop until college and wished that I had had before that, most certainly. So yeah, those are some options for you. And of course, I mentioned that you should reach out if there are apps that you or your students use that are fantastic that we didn't mention. iosday@twit.tv is how you get in touch. All right, moving along to the news. The news is up next. I just wanted to mention that iOS 27, of course, is getting some updates leading up to the fall launch. Launch of the 27 roundouts.

Mikah Sargent [00:20:08]:
So if you are kind of wondering where things stand, I'm sure by the time this episode publishes, we'll be seeing even later stage betas. But we've got new app icons for some of the apps. We've got new Siri voices, or rather changes to the Siri voices that, that there's more options when it comes to changing how the voices are or are not expressive. Improved search. And it does feel like we're kind of starting to narrow in on things. And I am curious, Rosemary, about the impact that the new Siri is going to have on students. I think it'll be a positive impact. Students can use Search, can use Siri, can use notifications to also improve theirs.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:00]:
And we've also heard about like battery life improvements, which I think everyone can benefit from. Mm-hmm.

Rosemary Orchard [00:21:07]:
Oh yeah, definitely. I distinctly remember carrying battery packs around when I was a student because I would be going through my phone and iPad battery fairly quickly. This was back in the days when there weren't that many apps, folks. So I, I, let's just say I've always been one of those people that's on my devices and that's not likely to change. I just try to be intentional about it. Um, yeah, there, there's going to be a lot to end. I think it's, I think it's gonna be fun. We're gonna get to see, and especially if you know a student or you are a student, uh, It doesn't matter how old you are.

Rosemary Orchard [00:21:36]:
You might be going to college for the very first time, or you might be teaching somewhere, or, you know, doing anything, taking night classes because you found something that interests you. If you are using your iPhone, iPad, Vision Pro, HomePod, Apple TV in any way that helps you learn, we would absolutely love to hear about that.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:57]:
Absolutely. All right. That is going to bring us to the app cap segment of the show, and I just wanted to mention in the past we had talked about a way for tracking sunlight. I wanted to mention a fun little app called Moonlit, which is a moon phase tracker. It is a lunar calendar, but it also uses AR to kind of locate where the moon is, and I don't know, it's just kind of nice. You can track eclipses, you can see where the Moon is at what time, and you can kind of get an idea of what the Moon looks like and, you know, the way that it goes. If you have students that are kind of learning about space, learning about them— I remember learning about waxing and waning and having to label all of the different phases of the Moon. This is a great way to have a more practical representation.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:03]:
of the experience. Uh, I should also mention that the developer makes the opposite app, which is Sunlit, a sun tracker. So you can get Sunlit and Moonlit and be able to track our 2, um, I would say dearest— our 2 dearest, um, uh, wow, what is the word— cosmic bodies. Yeah. Uh, Some people would argue that that might be Venus or some other thing, but I think that the Sun and the Moon are incredibly important to us here on Earth. So yeah, check that out. Moonlit, the moon phase tracker. Rosemary, anything from you for App Caps this week?

Rosemary Orchard [00:23:48]:
I'm just gonna say, based on what you were saying there, Micah, if people haven't seen CGP Grey's video on Our Closest Planet, you should absolutely do that. Which celestial body is actually closest to us? It is well worth a watch. Also, hexagons are the bestagons. So that's another fun video to check out if you are looking for something that's educational, but it's edutainment. It is definitely entertaining education.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:15]:
Wonderful. We will definitely— I'm definitely gonna have to check that out. Alrighty, folks, that brings us to the end of this episode of iOS Today. If you have questions, comments, et cetera, you can email us, Follow us today at twit.tv is how you get in touch. Rosemary Orchard, if people would like to follow you online and check out all the great work you're doing, where should they go to do so?

Rosemary Orchard [00:24:33]:
The best place to go is rosemaryorchard.com, which has got links to apps, books, and podcasts that I am or have been involved in. And the other places that you can find me are, of course, social media, including the Club Twit Discord, where we're currently having a talk about how you can use sun and moon tracking for lighting film sets and looking like a magician, which sounds incredible. So I would like to know, Micah, what rabbit are you pulling out of your hat? Where can people find you?

Mikah Sargent [00:24:57]:
You can find me online. I'm @MicahSargent on many a social media network, or you can head to chihuahua.coffee, chihuahua.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. And it's so weird when I pull a rabbit out of my hat, it's just a chihuahua with little rabbit ear headband on top. Thank you everybody for tuning in. We'll catch you again next week for another episode of iOS Today. Bye-bye.